


Prompt: Disconnect and Distance

by EssayOfThoughts



Series: MCU Maximoff Oneshots [124]
Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Codependency, Eventual Cooperation, Gen, Pietro Has Issues, Resentment
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-05-24
Updated: 2017-05-24
Packaged: 2018-11-04 13:25:01
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,524
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10991832
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/EssayOfThoughts/pseuds/EssayOfThoughts
Summary: He rises from the Cradle to return to Wanda’s side and-He is not forbidden it, not exactly, Wanda welcomes him back with the same sun-bright gladness they have always felt at reunion, the cathedral of her mind so brightly sun-lit and shining, shimmering with light that shows the cracks in the stone, shows where the underlying wood of the synagogue waits beneath.Wanda is glad to have him back, the archer looks at him with gratefulness, the Vision takes his hand and shakes it and says, “I am most pleased to properly meet you, Mr. Maximoff.”“You’re behind,” says Romanoff. “Your sister can protect herself better than you can right now. Come on, up. We’re teaching you to spar.”





	Prompt: Disconnect and Distance

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Nanyoky](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Nanyoky/gifts).



> Written for a prompt on my tumblr, readable [Here](http://essayofthoughts.tumblr.com/post/161032801215/fic-prompt-pietro-lives-and-natasha-mentors-him).

**i.**  
He resents it, when he wakes - resents _her._  Not Wanda, not ever Wanda, but Romanoff, the Black Widow. Romanoff has been teaching Wanda while he heals, and on some level he resents this, that Natasha was there to spend time with his sister, was, like Barton and the Vision, there for his sister when she needed him most.

(When she needed him most because he couldn’t be there.)

Wanda is farther ahead in training than him and he doesn’t resent this, he never could, he would always prefer Wanda to be prepared for the world but… it does _sadden_  him. There is a disconnect, now, a distance. He can learn some things from her mind, some facts and figures, some information and forms, but so much of it is muscle memory, how to fall and how to roll, how to target and he falls still farther behind as he heals and mends, regains muscle mass and mobility, finding his speed again.

He resents Romanoff for this, for _causing_  this, this disconnect and distance, putting him farther behind his sister so he must race to catch up when his speed is at it’s most uncooperative.

When he goes to train it is with dragging feet, even as he knows it to be necessary.

 

* * *

 

 **ii.**  
He rises from the Cradle to return to Wanda’s side and-

He is not forbidden it, not exactly, Wanda welcomes him back with the same sun-bright gladness they have always felt at reunion, the cathedral of her mind so brightly sun-lit and shining, shimmering with light that shows the cracks in the stone, shows where the underlying wood of the synagogue waits beneath.

Wanda is glad to have him back, the archer looks at him with gratefulness, the Vision takes his hand and shakes it and says, “I am most pleased to properly meet you, Mr. Maximoff.”

“You’re behind,” says Romanoff. “Your sister can protect herself better than you can right now. Come on, up. We’re teaching you to spar.”

He spars. He spars _slowly_ , because his speed is at it’s most uncooperative, coming in fits and starts like the beginning, straining against his control or relaxing to nothingness and so he finds himself restraining nothing.

And then suddenly the blue returns, a bright blur of it, and he’s ploughed into the wall across the training room with no warning.

Romanoff crouches next to him, an icepack in hand. “Gotta be careful, flyboy,” she says, pressing the ice to his bleeding face. “You’ll end up like Clint at this rate.”

When the bleeding has slowed they start again. “Could I not have Wanda here?” he asks. “She helped me control my speed when we first-”

“And risk Wanda getting hurt if you both fail?” Romanoff asks, both eyebrows raised. “You’re as bad as Steve.”

When Wanda sees him later, his face is covered in cuts but they’re scabbed over now, the scabs starting to peel off smooth flesh. Her hands go to her mouth, eyes wide with shock before she crosses to him, ignoring the others sitting in a circle.

Her hands are gentle on his bruises.

“I should have been there,” she whispers. “I could help you find your blue, keep it in your control-”

He bows her head to her soft hands and cannot help how much he resents Romanoff for making him train alone.

 

* * *

 

 **iii.**  
“You’re not doing well in training, Nat says.”

It’s Barton, perched next to him on the roof. He knows Wanda comes up here when she has nightmares and knows that Barton sometimes joins her - that he’d talked her down and away from the ledge while he’d been healing in the cradle. Even now there’s a small scruffy looking crow beside the archer, and his sister’s big and glossy attendants watch him with a haughty eye.

“Pietro?”

He sighs, looks down at his linked hands. Tries really, _really_  hard not to resent Romanoff and her smug little smile and the way she always seems to know - it’s like Wanda but more irritating, because with his sister he at least always knows that she knows things to keep them both safe, that she cares for both of their well-being and doesn’t have ulterior motives. Wanda has a _right_  to know him that well, to understand, to act on both their behalfs. Romanoff does not.

He tries not to resent Romanoff, and he fails.

“Its…,” he starts. “My speed. It’s like it was in the beginning. Fits and starts.”

“Mhm?” Clint’s hum is mildly interested and his raised eyebrows as he sips his beer makes Pietro gesture helplessly.

“I just… It is there and then it is not there, so I hold it and restrain it so I can relax into it and then it is gone and I am slow or it is gone so I let go and then it is back and-” he makes a harsh gesture, a sweeping motion. “Bang. I run into a wall.”

Clint laughs, gestures with his bottle. “You’re gonna end up like me.”

_(“You’ll end up like Clint at this rate.”)_

It’s easier, though, from Clint. Clint understands the debt that’s strung between the three of them - owing Wanda for Pietro’s life almost-lost. Clint offers kindness and understanding where Romanoff offers only smug smiles and her smug _knowing._

“That is what Romanoff said too.”

Clint sips his beer, considers. “Why not come stay at the farm for a bit? Get yourself a bit of legroom.”

The farm is open space, a large house and so much space to run in that Pietro never fears colliding with anything. Wanda goes with him, and her hand in his, her by his side, makes him feel, for a little while, like everything is fine, like it is normal, that this disconnect and distance placed between them is going to ease and fade.

Then, one morning, Romanoff is waiting for them at breakfast.

“Come on, quicksilver,” she says. “Gonna keep hiding from practice?”

 

* * *

 

 **iv.**  
He resents Natasha. He resents her putting this distance between him and Wanda, resents her enforcing it by not letting them train together - they, who have always been together, at one another’s sides, pillars to each other, a force unsundered - by dragging him back to the base to keep on training.

“Hey, it could be worse,” she says. “I could have dragged your sister back too, and then she’d be getting even further ahead.”

Pietro spits blood and pushes himself up. “So what,” he says. “I should be grateful?”

Natasha shrugs, shifts her stance, raises her fists. “This way,” she says, “It’s less of a game of catch up.”

Pietro lunges.

He doesn’t know how he keeps missing her. He may not have his speed back properly yet, it still likes to come in fits and starts, vanishing into the aether as it pleases. He lunges and puts all his speed behind it and she still steps out of the way like it’s nothing. He gives no hint of his plans and she still knows. It’s like she can read his face and stance as well as Wanda, except she is _not_ Wanda and she has _no right_  to know him like this.

“You’re predictable blueboy,” she says. “You go for the most obvious and straightforward.”

Well then. He supposes he’s going to have to sidestep around this.

That’s what he does. Next time they spar, when his blue is tight and close on his leash, he lets it out, just enough to blur forwards, yes, where Natasha’s fist is waiting for him, and then _behind_  her, past her fist, and quick enough to knock her down.

He grins at the sound of her head thumping to the sparring mat, turns to smirk down at her where she laughs.

“Not bad,” she says, and then kicks his legs out from under him. “Could be better.”

 

* * *

 

 **v.**  
He and Natasha wait on the roof on the day Clint is to return Wanda from the farm. He’s not quite up to scratch yet - and he still resents Natasha, for her training, for her smugness, for her knowing, for this distance and disconnect between himself and Wanda.

But he thinks he understands her a little now, understands why she wouldn’t want Wanda around while he regains his control of his speed - because he needs to control it on his own, without using Wanda as a crutch, just as much as the need to keep Wanda safe from accidents - why she has been so insistent on training him.

He is better now, if not yet quite good enough, and they stand together and wait for the Quinjet.

They wait. 

They wait some more.

They keep on waiting til dusk when Natasha’s phone starts singing _Pocket Full of Sunshine._

“Laura?” she asks. “Hang on, hang on, I’m putting you on speakerphone.”

 _“Is Clint with you?”_  comes Laura’s urgent voice. _“He hasn’t come back yet.”_

Natasha glances to Pietro. “He hasn’t shown up at all, him or Wanda.”

Laura’s voice is distinctly and clearly worried. _“They set off this morning.”_

Natasha’s shoulders straighten, something in the set of her face turns to stone. “I’ll find them,” she promises. “I’ll call you soon Laura. Tell the kids not to worry.”

She ends the call, one hand slipping the phone into her pocket, the other rising to the arrow necklace she never takes off. She breathes slowly, deeply, eyes focussed on something distant, sometimes darting to some other distant thing.

“They took a Quinjet, yes?” Pietro asks. “Stark made them.”

Natasha’s hand fists around the necklace before loosing, dropping to her side like nothing was wrong. “Yes,” she says. “And what Stark makes rarely malfunctions.”

Pietro finds his speed, grips it with all his might. “I’ll find him,” he says.

It’s hard to focus on everything with his speed like this, having to focus on taming it to his will just as much as everything around him, but he finds Stark in his lab in the basement, head half-inside the guts of a very old computer monitor.

“Stark.”

Stark’s face is rimed with dust and soot as he pulls it out of the computer. “Roadrunner,” he says. “Where’s Sabrina?”

It takes Pietro a moment to parse that Stark probably means Wanda. “We don’t know. We need you to track the Quinjet Clint was using.”

“Ever heard of ‘ _please’?”_  Stark asks, already wading through tools and wiring to his console. “FRIDAY, can you find it?” Stark’s fingers are as precise and focussed on his keyboard as Wanda is with her scarlet, typing in commands in a blur. “Who’s ‘ _we’_  anyway?”

“Romanoff.”

Who, incidentally, had just turned up, slightly out of breath, at the door.

“Something happen?”

Pietro’s glare at Stark’s back is venomous.

“We can handle it,” Natasha says. “Where is it?”

Stark’s AI throws up a map, Stark’s fingers enlarge it.

“Right about…. _here.”_

In the middle of absolutely nowhere.

Pietro swears in Sokovian.

 

* * *

 

 **vi.**  
Pietro rolls on the balls of his feet, not even considering sitting as Natasha starts up the Quinjet Stark sorted for them. His mind is roiling with worries and possibilities - _If I’d been there, if I hadn’t gone back for training, if I’d been at Wanda’s side, if, if, if_  -

It’s not doing any good but he can’t switch it off.

“Hey, you doing ok?”

He’s not, he’s _really_  not, but he can’t let that get to him now. It’s only him and Natasha heading out after them, anyway, after Wanda and Clint and whoever took them or took out the Quinjet.

As they near the spot, he can almost _feel_  Natasha’s frown.

“That’s…,” she says. “That’s a SHIELD craft.”

It is. There’s their Quinjet, clean of insignias, neat and tidy, still with one of Starks _JARVIS is my Copilot_  stickers on the window that no one had dared touch after Novi Grad, and, beside it, another Quinjet with the SHIELD eagle emblazoned on the side.

Romanoff presses a button, waves something from her screen to Pietro’s. 

“Check the code,” she says. “It may have been stolen by HYDRA.”

He’s got used to the consoles now, after a little while. Much as he hates Stark, he has to admit the man has a knack for design, for making things easy to understand and work with. “HYDRA,” he says, after a moment. “One of the ones under... Alexander Pierce.”

Romanoff goes white as she sets the Quinjet down. “Pierce is dead,” she says, flicking the Quinjet into standby. “I saw him killed myself.”

Pietro frowns. “So who has it then?”

Natasha’s already at the door, checking her guns, charging up the weapons strapped to her wrists. “One of his, probably. One of his agents or technicians.”

Pietro pauses, worries the skin of his cheek between his teeth. “What would they want with Wanda?” 

Natasha pulls a face, shrugs. “We’ll find out,” she says. “Go scout out.”

He’s off in a blur, dodging around obstacles, and heading for the other two Quinjets. When he risks a look backwards he sees Natasha slipping off the cloaked Quinjet, hidden in the long grass and loose rocks like the spider she’s named for.

The Avenger’s Quinjet is empty, door wide open and no sign of Wanda or Clint. So too, for that matter, is the other, but there’s tracks, big booted feet followed by a prints from a pair of crocs (probably Clint) and Wanda’s smaller boots. 

The tracks lead to a safe house, and he’d all but dive in on his own, if not for the fact he knows there could be more inside and that Romanoff will never let him hear the end of it if he screws up. He doesn’t have to wait long, however, Natasha arrives and scales the building, checks in every window.

“Just them,” she says, and launches herself through the window onto the back of a man with a metal arm.

Her bracelets blaze blue with light and the man goes still.

Romanoff finds Clint in one room, tied to a chair and with a black eye. Pietro finds Wanda in a locked room, the walls made of some material he doesn’t recognise. 

It’s not until they get outside that he feels Wanda’s mind against his.

“Wanda,” he breathes, and his hands cup her face, thumbs running under her eyes to check for teartracks. She wraps her arms around him, tucks her face to his shoulder the moment his hands move to her hair, and he carefully untangles the knots that have accumulated and breathes his sister in. “You are all right?”

She nods against him, letting out a long breath, slow and steady and calming. “His mind,” she whispers, and Pietro’s gaze darts to the metal-armed man still in a pile on the floor. “His mind is a ruin.”

“The man,” Clint Barton says rubbing his wrists to get circulation back. “Is Bucky Barnes.”

It’s not until later, on the Quinjet, his mind and Wanda’s running in tandem again, filling each other in with what happened, that Pietro realises: the resentment has vanished. It is no more there than the disconnect and distance he had been feeling.

 

* * *

 

**Author's Note:**

> Please leave comments!


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